Friday, November 21, 2008

I cannot believe that I haven't posted anything yet on the new Colorado Association of Libraries Second Life Interest Group (CAL SLIG). I guess when you're busy in the middle of something, it can still slip under the radar.

My co-presenter at CAL '08, and friend, Eileen Dumas, and I have been working on forming a new Second Life library; in addition to creating a new library beneficial to Second Life residents, we wanted this library to be a way for Colorado librarians to become more involved in Second Life.

The first step was to formulate a library concept. With so many Colorado libraries (including my library, the Mancos Public Library) building green buildings, and no libraries in Second Life currently of this type, 'green' was a natural fit. Eileen and I worked on a mission statement for the library, and the Sustainable Living Library was born.

We then needed to explore a way to excite interest in the project amongst Colorado librarians. After speaking with a few librarians, we were pointed to Martin Garnar, then the President of CAL. I had recently met Martin at a Town Hall meeting, so I felt comfortable 'cold calling' him. He was wonderful, and enthusiastic about the project. He recommended coming to the November Board meeting and presenting a proposal to start an Interest Group.

To start an interest group, a statement of purpose needs to be drafted, explaining what the benefit is of forming the group. Also, a petition with 8 signatures of CAL members needs to be attached. Being scattered all over the state, getting the signatures posed a problem at first, but we finally ended up with 15!

At the board meeting, our proposal was greeted by much excitement. Some people even wanted us to further our scope into other virtual worlds! It was discussed that if this initial project is sucessful, a Virtual Worlds Division of CAL would be considered.

Voting was conducted, and the board returned an unanimous vote in favor of forming the Second Life Interest Group. I just found out today that SLIG now has it's own page on the CAL website. We're official!

Thursday, November 20, 2008

I'd like to share a bit with you about the new Colorado Association of Libraries Leadership Institute. In it's inaugural year, 25 Colorado librarians were chosen to participate in this year long program. A co-worker of mine from the Mancos Public Library and I were lucky to have been chosen for this Institute. Over the course of the next year, we'll be making 4 trips to Denver, and participating in virtual sessions in between. We will be learning about Colorado librarianship, and how to take part as a leader.

Our first session coincided with the CAL Annual Conference. Pat Wagner, of Pattern Research, led the first session, and was amazing. While I've met Pat before, I have never attended any of her talks or workshops. She created three group activities, the first of which began the 'bonding' process with all of the members. Her energy, examples, and stories made the workshop content easy to understand and fun! This was a great way to start the Institute, and the group activities were a fun and informal way to meet and learn about the other members.

Our member group has a wide range of experience, education, come from all types of libraries and have many different job descriptions. What's better, everyone is excited to learn and get the most out of the Institute. I've already had several conversations with some of the other members, and we've all found common ground. The networking opportunities alone make this Institute worth it.

And our Leadership Institute Task Force members - not only are they a great bunch of smart and fun people, they are all library leaders themselves! We will have a lot to learn from them in the next year.

Something I love about the Institute is our online group Ning. It is a wonderful way to communicate with the other institute members. Most of the members are many hours away by car, so in the times in between face-to-face workshops, I can still chat with them about Leadership topics and other things.

Another thing that I love, is that I'm in this with a co-worker, Charlene Swansen. Being from such a remote area of Colorado, we have someone readily available to discuss the Institute; we can really talk in-depth easily, and quickly bounce ideas and thoughts off each other.

Here is a picture of our Leadership members, taken on the day of our first session:

Sunday, November 16, 2008

Last week I had the pleasure of hearing librarian, blogger, and techie Jessamyn West speak at the CAL annual Conference. She spoke about open libraries; how through using Web2.0 tools, libraries are creating a culture of transparency and what this means to us and our patrons.

She was a very entertaining speaker, and got some non-tech people revved up about what 2.0 tools they could implement at their libraries.

Well, for the first time today I attempted to transfer pictures taken on my phone, to my computer. I've never had a phone that takes pictures (Remember: Rural), so I've never had the joy of transferring pics.

Joy?!? Total FAIL.

Here's Why:

No USB - What?!?

Phone does Not Automatically Save to Micro Disk - I went through the process of taking out my micro SD card, putting it in the larger SD adapter, finally found the removeable memory... No pictures! Duh.

No Mass Move - There is no option on my phone to move pictures to the micro disk all at once. You. must. move. each picture. individually. Ouch.

4 Pics to a Screen - I have 157 pictures on my camera (Yes, I have been procrastinating, my bad.). To remove the pictures, one by one, I must scroll through Multiple screens of 4 pictures each. Double Ouch!

TIME! - It took me about 1/2 hour to transfer 23 pictures. Wah.

Attention Drain - I'm used to multitasking. I Deal. But with the image to card transfer so labor intensive, I'm working with just one hand. I get distracted. This is not a good thing.

No Dating of Images - Again, what?!?

Enough of the rant. Now that I have gotten this far with the pictures, I have to put them to some use. *Sigh* ;-P

Thursday, November 13, 2008

I was recently interviewed by Tom Peters for the ALA Tech Source Blog. Tom and I are working together with other librarians across the globe on a 'green' sim project in the virtual world of Second Life.

This interview, however, focuses on my real life library, Mancos Public Library, and our Leadership in Energy and Environment Design (LEED) building project.

As Tom points out in the article, it is a wonderful thing when Second Life [and all social networking sites] gets us out there and communicating with other librarians and people that we may not usually meet. Living in a remote rural area, networking is naturally limited; the Internet is a crumbler of those barriers.

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About Me

Victoria Petersen is a Digital Consultant for The Geeks. She creates websites, designs MicroSites & Strategies for Facebook & Google+ pages, and dabbles in graphic design. The Geeks are a one-stop-shop for all your business needs. Whether its a new computer or network needed for your business, or retrieving data off a crashed hard drive, the Geeks Can Help!

She believes that technology and social media provides wonderful tools for learning, providing information, and connecting with people.

On the personal side, she has a wonderful husband (also a Geek), and two terrific boys. They live and play in Southwest Colorado.